AMD To Drop ATI Brand

Chip guru AMD has announced that it’s going to drop the ATI brand name following its takeover of the Canadian graphics underdog. Gareth Cater from AMD told Custom PC that ‘the new company will be called AMD’, meaning that we could shortly be seeing AMD-branded Radeon graphics chips.

You know, I’m not entirely sure what makes ATI’s binary drivers any worse than nvidia’s. I’m using the latest ATI drivers (8.27.10). The installer for the drivers builds packages for lots of different distros, and the performance I’m getting is very, very good.

Now there is no doubt in my mind that ATI’s Windows Drivers/Software are complete crap compated to nvidia’s. I hope the improve that for sure, but both ATI and AMD are hardware companies, so I’m not sure why AMD would be any better at the software stuff than ATI.

That’s strange. nVidia distributes nearly the same driver (unified driver model) on Linux as they do on Windows, while ATi has always developed a separate fglrx driver based on their old workstation support for FireGL. You realize that nVidia has superior Windows drivers, so therefore it should follow that nVidia’s binary Linux drivers are better.

Furthermore, nVidia supports the vast majority of their cards on Linux, whereas the Linux community has no reasonable expectation of having an R500 driver anytime soon. nVidia supports SLI (albeit rather poorly) on Linux, whereas ATi doesn’t support Crossfire at all, and they also have better multi-head support for Linux.

You might want to read Phoronix for more information. ATi has been getting better, but they still trail nVidia quite substantially in Linux support.

However, the open source R200/300 driver is much better than the open source nVidia driver. You might also be interested in the Nouveau Project, which aims to reverse engineer an open source 3D-accelerated driver for nVidia chipsets.

That’s strange. nVidia distributes nearly the same driver (unified driver model) on Linux as they do on Windows, while ATi has always developed a separate fglrx driver based on their old workstation support for FireGL. You realize that nVidia has superior Windows drivers, so therefore it should follow that nVidia’s binary Linux drivers are better.

Your logic assumes that he thinks the ATI Windows drivers are better than the linux ones. Which I think is reasonable, but if you are a huge anti-.NET person you might hate the ATI windows drivers and think the linux ones are great in comparison.

Butters, the nVidia might be working great (Where the secret is the wrapper approach) on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Windy – but there’s no support of any other platforms. nVidia refuse to release even 2D specs under NDA, which means that reverse engineering is the only way to get any support of nVidia graphics processors. THAT SUCKS!

Short of open sourcing their drivers, you won’t see nVidia supported drivers for BeOS/Haiku anytime in the near (far…) future. It simply makes NO economic sense. A hobbiest might reverse engineer 2d stuff, and maybe even 3d – but if I was nVidia, and I wasn’t going to open source my drivers, no way in heck I’d spend a penny paying an employee to port to BeOS/Haiku. The employee’s time would be worth far more than the possible *profit* to be made from Haiku users purchasing nVidia cards only due to wanting to run Haiku.

We don’t even know if Haiku is going to be 1.0 release quality in the next year or two or five.

I loved BeOS, bought it from R3 on. I REALLY wanted it to continue, watched Be, Inc. do the stupid migration to embedded stuff, watched Be, Inc. disappear and BeOS get sold. Watched nothing occur for years, then finally Haiku started moving due to Axel and a few others I forget the nicknames of. It’s still moving along slowly, and I wish it the best, but it’s got a LOT of catching up to do now. Remember, 1.0 is basically just going to be a bug-fixed R5. That’s old stuff.

It makes no sense to not release the specs unfortanetly. They could if they wanted to, but business is about information and keeping it. IF they can be given some compelling (ie financial) reasons to do so they will in a heartbeat. Nvidia has no reason to keep them a secret, their competitors know how to reverse engineer, anything they licensed could easily be renegotiated…

Hm. I’ve never even looked at ATI or nVidia drivers. I just made sure to choose a card that’s supported by the DRI drivers, let autodetection do its thing, and have been using my computer ever since. I’ve got 3D h/w accel (glxinfo tells me so)… no idea how, performance-wise, it compares with the proprietary drivers. I’m not too much of a gamer though.

It would seem that it’d be great for AMD to just pitch in and help out with the DRI drivers.

It’s good to see that AMD is going to take total responsiblity for ATI’s technology and it’s implementation. By dropping the ATI name (and it does make me sad, ATI was a solid Canadian tech company) AMD is putting it’s money where it’s mouth is. I think we’re going to get some goodness out of this.

I am happy they are dropping the ATI brand. I think they are going for IGP in the future. All in one solutions. uit’s betttttttttttter. I think it’s more efficient because you just have to buy one board and it is totally cheap. I can get an IGP board that runs faster then gforce 5 for like 50 dollars.

I remember reading about Torrenza, a co-processor like design for third parties that wanted to communicate directly with the CPUs via HyperTransport. I don’t see why AMD won’t produce a video chip that acts as a co-processor with an onboard memory controller and two or three HyperTransport links like Opterons. I think that may scare nVidia…